Mali: Rule one - keep the chief happy

When in Mali you just have to take in Timbuktu but, finds Jim Shelley, the country's real fascination lies in a trek to its primitive Dogon country

THE most remarkable thing about Timbuktu is that even now, centuries after it made its name as one of the world's most glittering cities, the old mystique lures you in. This is despite the fact that the legendary difficulties in getting there remain, and regardless of its widely-held reputation nowadays as a dump.

In dusty dead-end towns all over Mali, people warned me not to bother, confirming its dismal dismissal by most travel books. Timbuktu, however, has the cachet of being a challenge. It is still the ultimate badge of honour to be able to say you have been to Timbuktu and back. The local police enter your name in their ledger and put a big blue stamp in your passport to prove it. Even in today's age of global travel, Timbuktu's place in the language as a symbol for the Back of Beyond is still apposite.

Mali is twice the size of France but the map shows that more than half of it is Sahara - a huge triangular slab balanced precariously and almost directly on top of Timbuktu. The easiest way to get there is by a rattling Russian-built plane. This only takes an hour from the city of Mopti, but gives you the choice of leaving the day after you get there - which hardly seems worth it - or waiting for the next flight in three days. This long in Timbuktu, I was to learn, would begin to feel like three weeks.

Timbuktu has the wild, abandoned atmosphere of a deserted frontier town but is actually on the border of nowhere; nowhere, that is, except the desert which is creeping inexorably in, driving the inhabitants and the life of the town out (11,000 people remain, half as many as five years ago).

Wandering around Timbuktu for the first time, the gravity of your situation becomes clear the moment you realise that, having assumed you have misread the map and strayed into its more inert, uninteresting outskirts, you are in fact on Timbuktu's main street, or in its most prestigious square. The sand seems to sap your spirit. Wherever you are in Timbuktu, the view will be more or less the same: grey sand blurring into grey monotone houses. Gardens are walled off, but only consist of more grey sand.

Along the main "road" (slightly more compacted sand), a handful of ram-shackle raffia huts serve as tailors, barbers or motorcycle-repair shops. There is no traffic other than an occasional solitary motorcycle rider who, with his face hidden from the sand by sunglasses, scarf and the hood of his dusty anorak, looks like a bandit from a Western.

The lack of buses, taxis or even the donkey-drawn carts you find in the rest of Mali is explained by the fact that there is nowhere to go. There are two rather bland artisan shops but the Tuareg nomads' market shut down three years ago. The local museum has been closed to prevent the theft of antiquities which have been plundered from the town by art dealers, like vultures stripping a corpse.

An aimless stroll around the backstreets is accompanied by the manic guitar music favoured by the Tuareg: deranged, seemingly endless, guitar solos. Once in a while you get a blast of Tupac Shakur, the Bob Marley of hip-hop, whose murder in Las Vegas is still shrouded in doubt.

An inevitable posse of children follows you, their distended naked bodies white with dust, imploring you to take a guided tour or endlessly offering you a shoeshine - simultaneously the most necessary and most futile thing in Timbuktu. Looking at your shoes, which are permanently powdered with sand, they seem perplexed by the idea that you do not want a shoeshine. "You like Timbook?" they cheep, brightly, in the face of all the evidence around them, daring you to break their hearts.

They are the only ones with any energy. Although visiting tourists are the city's (albeit fading) life-blood, the street-vendors and staff in the hotels are a joyless and lethargic bunch. The shortage of money in circulation is so acute that every transaction, even buying (unchilled) bottles of water can take an age because you have to wait for change.

After a couple of days in Timbuktu, the most appealing thing to do is get out of it. A day/night out in the desert on a groaning, spitting camel suddenly seems like a great idea.

But, ironically, the main attraction Mali has to offer tourists is a region so primitive and remote, it makes Timbuktu look metropolitan. Trekking out to the Dogon Country - walking with a guide between seven and 10 kilometres a day along the vast Bandiagara escarpment - is rated by Lonely Planet as one of the top 10 attractions in West Africa. Miles away from anything as modern as electricity, some of the views - looking out over the seemingly endless plains as far as Burkina Faso - are breath-taking. Ennde, for example, is so tiny and primitive, you really feel you are in another world, on the top of the world.

The Dogon people migrated to Mali from the Nile Valley in the 12th century. They still worship the God Amma who, as the Rough Guide puts it, "created the Earth by throwing a ball of clay into space. . . the ball took on the shape of Woman, with an ant-hole for a vagina and termite mound for a clitoris".

The Dogon are still deeply superstitious. The most precious livestock a family owns will be decorated with pretty gris-gris round their necks for protection or luck. The women and older villagers are wary of too much contact with the Touba (white man/doctor), though the gift of a bag of white seed-like kola nuts, brought from Mopti or Bandiagara for the elders or chiefs, inspires wide smiles. Generally, the villagers are welcoming and generous, proudly offering souvenirs. Elaborately carved doors and Dogon masks, ranging from the bizarre to the truly terrifying, are regarded by collectors as some of the best in Africa.

Competition among guides was fierce in Mopti, but the one everyone seemed to recommend was known as "L'Homme de Dourou" - a cheeky, charming young lad with good English, indefatigable good humour and a fanatical love of American hip-hop. His colleague, Ibhrahim, came along to discuss the World Cup and practise his Italian (he was obsessed with Italian women).

With L'Homme leading the way, the four-day trek took in most striking villages - Kani-Kombole, Teli, Ennde and Begnimato. We took a jeep as far as Djigulbornbo, sharing it with three French students, several packets of spaghetti and a clutch of feuding chickens - gifts to the chief of the first village and, for the days after that, our dinner.

The days invariably began with me being woken by the braying of donkeys which hobble around the villages with their feet tied to stop them going too far, or by triumphant-sounding roosters that seemed to crow all night, regardless of whether it was actually sunrise. Children ran around in the dust, playing a kind of Dogon hockey, undeterred by a pitch punctuated with the humps needed for the irrigation system.

Breakfast would be hot dough-balls and jam. Between 1pm-4pm, the heat would be so intense that we would stop off at a village for lunch - usually a kind of cassava-flavoured baby food washed down with bowls of thin yellow kojo (millet beer).

Pitch-black night suddenly fell around 7pm. Fireside dances were organised for our benefit by the village teacher: passionate, increasingly abandoned, displays by the women and children, while the men beat out a hypnotic battery on their drums. The more reckless wild-eyed dancers, L'Homme told us, were the ones who had been drinking kill-killi, a local moonshine he claimed was 85 per cent proof and had been banned by the government because several people had died after drinking too much of it.

A tentative sip convinced me it was not that strong after all. I had downed a few glasses before L'Homme told me he had found out that the chief had been diluting it for me - with water that was probably more harmful than the kill-killi.

The most amazing sight of the trip was probably in Teli, where you can still see the houses inhabited by the Tellem "pygmies" before the Dogon drove them out in the 17th century. Slightly sinister-looking constructions no bigger than elongated phone boxes with one tiny square window, the tiniest of the houses are wedged under the roof of the 300-metre high escarpment, which is littered with burial caves where the villagers still bury their dead, hauling them up the cliff-face by ropes.

In Teli, the village mystic - a wizened, crazy-looking old man with missing teeth, yellow eyes and a thick white bandanna around his forehead, the spitting image of the Monty Python hermit - has, apparently, been living up there for eight years, supplied by the villagers. Even L'Homme, whose jeans, baseball cap and Tupac T-shirt made him probably the most Western-looking boy in Mali, admitted to consulting the mystic before travelling or making any big changes in his life, although he refused to pay the "tax" the old man demanded as his price for photographs.

I had arrived in Mali with a carrier bag filled with Biros, yo-yos, party tooters, streamers and plastic puzzles from Woolworths which I had been distributing to all the children who followed us round, trilling, "Ca va, messieurs, cadeaux?"

I had not foreseen the impact these presents would make. In Teli, the rather imposing grumpy chief held court from a large open tent cluttered with rifles, slingshots and the hanging bodies of beheaded muskrat-like creatures, negotiating the price of any purchases visitors wanted to make.

Having demanded one of the party tooters for his son, he proceeded to lie in his hammock blowing it. In his long mauve robe and green fez, he was transformed from an Idi Amin-lookalike to a giggling overgrown child.

Far from leaving us in peace once they had been given one, the children would proudly rush up to show us each time they got the ballbearing into the centre of the puzzles, or confront me with the heartbreaking news that the paper streamer on their tooter had broken.

Each night, as I lay on a raffia mat on the village chief's roof, looking up at the stars, the blissful peace would be broken by the sound of tooters echoing across the valley, leaving me to wrestle with the knowledge that the next group of tourists would arrive, thinking they had ventured out to one of the great lost tribes of Mali, only to find that Woolworth party toys had been embraced into its ancient culture.

A return flight to Mopti is £591, including taxes, through Trailfinders (020 7938 3366). Internal flights to Timbuktu cost around £88.

Hotel Oasis (00 223 225022) in Mopti costs £12 a night for a double room; Hôtel Bouktou (00 223 921012) in Timbuktu costs £15 a night for a double room. A guide to Dogon charges around £40 per person.